A Royal recovery story

Now that George Alexander Louis, great-grandson to Prince Philip and Queen Elizabeth II, is in the news, let’s take a look at his lesser known ancestor, Philip’s mother, Princess Alice of Battenberg, later Princess Andrew of Greece and Denmark.

It’s quite the recovery story.

from Wiki
In 1930, after suffering a severe nervous breakdown, Princess Andrew was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, first by Thomas Ross, a psychiatrist who specialised in shell-shock, and subsequently by Sir Maurice Craig, who treated the future King George VI before he had speech therapy.[26] The diagnosis was confirmed at Dr Ernst Simmel’s sanatorium at Tegel, Berlin.[27] She was forcibly removed from her family and placed in Dr Ludwig Binswanger’s sanatorium in Kreuzlingen, Switzerland.[28] It was a famous and well-respected institution with several celebrity patients, including Vaslav Nijinsky, the ballet dancer and choreographer, who was there at the same time as Princess Andrew.[29] Binswanger also diagnosed schizophrenia. Both he and Simmel consulted Sigmund Freud who believed that the princess’s delusions were the result of sexual frustration. He recommended “X-raying her ovaries in order to kill off her libido.” Princess Andrew protested her sanity and repeatedly tried to leave the asylum.[26]

During Princess Andrew’s long convalescence, she and Prince Andrew drifted apart, her daughters all married German princes in 1930 and 1931 (she did not attend any of the weddings), and Prince Philip went to England to stay with his uncles, Lord Louis Mountbatten and George Mountbatten, 2nd Marquess of Milford Haven, and his grandmother, the Dowager Marchioness of Milford Haven.[30]

read about her remarkable recovery here

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